“Just kidding” is a phrase used by a large variety of people, from insecure high school girls to master pranksters after a successful hoax.

Its usage and meaning can vary subtly, but the phrase generally is used to indicate that what you just said is a lie or a joke. Also, if you have ever said the phrase, God automatically takes 5 years off your life.

But the older I got, the more obvious it became to me that “just kidding” was a kind of reverse inoculation — an attempt to take the sting out of a cruel, deeply personal dig at someone else.

It’s used primarily by witless oafs and is an almost infallible indicator of the speaker’s creative and emotional bankruptcy.

Except when my husband says it to me, of course…

I’ve tried to “train” him to stop doing it but I’m also temperamentally and philosophically averse to “husband training.”

The only tactic that’s worked so far is for me to reply somberly, “No one is ever just kidding” and hope that while I’m mouthing those words, I manage to look and sound as imposing as an arch, towering, Puritan witch-finder general pronouncing his sentence of death.

(That’s a pretty tough persona to pull off when you’re a female demi-dwarf, but that has never stopped me from trying.)

In mine, we found it safer to express long pent-up resentments and criticism of each other if a (soon-to-be-embarrassed) third party was present.

For instance, my mother’s hatred of my punk rock outfits only came out when we ran into one of her friends at the mall and she started “joking” about them to her pals, as if I weren’t there.

Criticizing other people is hard. We all develop our own drive-by “butt covering” tactics to pull it off (and get what we want) without (hopefully) getting knocked over by too much blowback.

My family’s broken “telephone” game is one.

The old “mouthwash in the locker” move is another.

What most of them have in common is the cowardly but highly effective “chemical warfare” of life strategies: passive aggression.

Often, as we review each day, only the closest scrutiny will reveal what our true motives were. There are cases where our ancient enemy rationalization has stepped in and has justified conduct which was really wrong. The temptation here is to imagine that we had good motives and reasons when we really hadn’t.

We “constructively criticized” someone who needed it, when our real motive was to win a useless argument. Or, the person concerned not being present, we thought we were helping others to understand him, when in actuality our true motive was to feel superior by pulling him down.

We hurt those we loved because they needed to be “taught a lesson”, but we really wanted to punish. We were depressed and complained we felt bad, when in fact we were mainly asking for sympathy and attention.

(KATHY SHAIDLE is a blogging pioneer who runs FiveFeetOfFury, now in its 15th year. She's been called "one of the great virtuoso polemicists of our time," by MARK STEYN. Her NEW book is Confessions of A Failed Slut (Thought Catalog, 2014).

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1.
Thunderbottom

“Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.” – Bion, Greek bucolic poet, 100 B.C.

In my Army days, I knew a Permanent Private who once expounded on this at great length. He was convinced that the magic phrase, “With all due respect, sir…”, when uttered prior to being completely disrespectful to an officer, made one impervious to military discipline. He actually said, “If you say that first, you can say anything you want to him after that.”

It didn’t work out well for him.

Private Brown, B-1-8, where are you these days? Sing-Sing, likely, I suppose.

Another verbal device is “To be honest with you.” I once had a manager who kept saying that in a meeting with an important client. Finally, the President of the client firm, an engineer, shouted out, “Why do you keep saying that? The basic expectation is that you’re always being honest. Should I not believe the statements you make to us not prefaced “To be honest with you?”

My manager looked confused. But the client wasn’t. We didn’t get the sale.

I had a colleague who was addicted to the phrase “Quite frankly.” I could put up with it at the office but he started using it in client meetings and I finally exploded at him to stop saying it. It implies that everything else he was saying was not frank. “Usually I’d be lying to you, but for this one sentence I shall tell the truth.”

Hulking, internet-illiterate Newfie Sheldon sat beside me as I tried to show him how to navigage the internet in 2002. “Load up one of those webpages with the 15 year old Russian mail order brides,” he demanded. “No….just kidding”.

Ever encountered this? Here’s an example: I knew this gay blade who was lamenting his cruel breakup with a friend. His parting comment to her was “Ummm sweetie, cows should not wear leather!” But after he said it, there was an unmistakable undertone of pride; that he was quite pleased with himself after his verbal slam dunk.

Yep, “…bless your heart” is a common and very useful Southern idiom. The meaning depends on the context; it can be the Dixie equivalent of “Uff da!” or “What a bummer!” but more often, it means “You just said or did something REALLY STUPID.” (per Jeff Foxworthy).

Bless your heart is the all purpose Southern phrase. It can mean congratulations. Emphasis is on the word “heart”. If emphasis is on the word “your”, it’s not a compliment. If emphasis is on the word “Bless” it is most likely an expression of compassion (which doesn’t get the intended person off the hook – it can be an expression of compassion for the person’s idiocy.)

Examples:
I just got married.
Bless your HEART.
I voted for Obama.
Bless YOUR heart. Or BLESS your heart.
I just got out of the hospital.
BLESS your heart.

(This key is an aid to those newly immigrated Southerners. We know y’all got here as quick as you could. Bless your heart.)

I’m a GREAT practical joker and I also plan things out (but not for months!). I also enjoy being “got,” although it’s hard to “get” me. Sometimes I see it coming and allow myself to be “got” just to please the “getter.”

My rules are I only pull them on people I like and they can never cause harm. Consternation – yes! But never harm.

I’ve been guilty of using those “buts,” but its better to just coolly, calmly, charitably say what we think. If your left-wing friends can’t take it, that’s their problem. And you’ll bring out the hatred and craziness in the ideologues no matter what. There’s no use in cringing before the Throne of PC.

How about some ad hominem PRAISE? Shaidle’s the best effin’ blogger out there. I love her truthisms. She’s practical but in a arse kicking sort of way. ♥ Nice to see a dame write with balls and not with all that touchy-feely, multi-culti marlarkey.

You have to bear in mind that on the Internet, nobody can see your facial expression. If I claim to be a Nepali tour guide IRL, people can generally tell if I am pulling their leg. On the ‘net, when I say it people have to either take it on face value or assume it is a lie… unless I clearly mark it as a joke.

I trained my wife to stopy saying “I’m sorry” when I come home from work and spew my frustrations about my job and she wants to cut me off because I’ve become boring and redundant. In stead of saying “I’m sorry” I’ve trained her to say “That Sucks!” Then I shut up and peacefully go hang out in the garage.

Years ago I know a family who had a son who regularly did wrong. As the 5 or 6 year old when I knew him, he would deliberately break things and with a big Cheshire Cat grin on his face say “sorrwee” and the parents would say “that’s OK.” Then he’d go destroy something else. I NEVER let them visit my place with him even though “he’d just love your Matchbox car collection.”

I’m sorry and Just kidding are just acts of attrition by the offender. They say it to fake remorse in order to avoid punishment they know they deserve.

A popular device, almost a requirement now, is for a news entertainer say, “It’s a tragedy, but…” Like with the woman married to the steelworker who was killed by Mitt Romney. I just saw a CNN news entertainer preface every statement in her report that mentioned the death say that.

No, it was not a tragedy; death is an unfortunate part of life. What was tragic was that her widow would stoop so low and allow the woman’s demise to be put into play.

Apparently these CYA prefaces can distract from what they’re really saying, too. As in this case, where the whole “killed by Mit Romney” thing was being pointed out as an ugly lie. The anchorwoman failed both to CYA and to educate our Alarmed Pig Farmer.

While there ARE icky people who pretend they are kidding while being cruel in order to avoid condemnation or a punch in the face, the phrase “just kidding” is not universally indicative of such an attempt. I can think of examples where this phrase is used completely innocently. I use this phrase to make sure someone knows I’m kidding when I’m joking about myself, others, politics, them, etc. usually when it’s clear the person didn’t realize I was making a joke or the person has a poor sense of humor and I have to explain it to them. Here are some examples:

1) What if I make a joke that I have herpes and the expression on the person’s face is not laughter but shock, a hasty, “just kidding” is definitely in order.
2) What if I make a statement that is purposely outrageously tasteless, like a racist statement, in order to make fun of racism, and I get a look that tells me the person doesn’t know I’m joking. I really think it’s important for my reputation’s sake to say “just kidding” in such a scenario.
3) What if I tease someone I love about a piece of inadvertent physical comedy they performed, and I don’t realize until it’s too late that it stung, I must say just kidding so they know I didn’t intend to prick them. Now if I followed it up by teasing them about the same thing again that would be cruel and intentional. But I can’t know 100% of the time in advance what a given person might be sensitive to.

I used the phrase Just Kidding the other day, when the bossman came in complaining to other employees that met him at the door of not feeling well. When he got to me, he asked me how I was doing and I told him that I was feeling terrible suffering from a stomach virus. You should have seen the look on his face. Immediately followed by “Just kidding” and we all had a laugh.

You have to use “just kidding” if you are being satirical or ironic, since those forms of humor seem to be hard for Americans to grasp. Otherwise, you can always be sarcastic, which Americans DO get but don’t like.

Yes, thank you, Sunny. What you say is of course common sense, but many people cannot (or perhaps refuse to) differentiate between real kidding and something said for a less “light-hearted” reason – that would appear to be the case with Kathy S. The comment “No one is ever just kidding” is nonsense; if one believes that 100% of all joking and teasing, even coming from a spouse, friend, sibling, etc., by definition must always have some slightly mean or sinister edge to it, than that person must be paranoid or have some real emotional issues. Or maybe all their family members and friends are just nasty people, but I don’t think that’s what the author believes or meant.

They say quite bluntly that the kid should be raped and killed. But, gosh! They’re so mad! …So I guess it’s OK. I mean, everyone gets that angry when confronted with an opposing viewpoint… right? (Go back to the news articles about kindergartners singing praises to Obama. Are there ANY “rape them and kill them” comments?)

I think it’s like the drug user’s ideology: “I get to go insane and then come back from it, and you can’t hold me accountable.”

When someone says that to me I always ask: Are you speaking to me? I’m a person. How can what you just said not be ‘personal’?

As for “just kidding”, it is only bad when the person isn’t really kidding. As long as what they are saying inflicts no harm and isn’t true, where’s the beef? Life lived too seriously is painful. Sometimes you get the elevator, and sometimes you get the shaft.

A special douchebag in the fake “just kidding” department is Garrison Keillor. On his radio show, he proposed that born-again Christians be denied the vote–just kidding, folks. It got a big laugh from his theater audience because they, like Keillor, enjoy nasty attacks on people they dislike, under cover of the fake joke. When Bush II was President, I didn’t listen much to his show because as soon as he made a fake-joke attack on Bush I changed stations. I still don’t listen much to his show, especially since so much of it now consists of re-runs, but when I have listened I haven’t heard a single joke about Obama, ever. Although he’s using the same old fake-joke cover for his attacks on Romney.

One no one has mentioned here yet is the ol’ “Oh, you’re too sensitive.” –Usually said as cover by the verbally abusive when their victims call them out on it. It’s never their fault for being nasty; it’s your fault for not allowing them to abuse you without guilt.

Also along the lines of “just kidding”: the startle/scare practical joke filmed by the perpetrator for broadcast on the various “funniest video” shows. At least when done by adults (I don’t think young kids know any better), I have always thought that those jokes reveal some very deep-seated hostility on the part of the doers toward the victims.